“Americans need to understand that religious liberty is good for the nation; it’s not just a form of right-wing special pleading,” writes Rachel Lu today in The Federalist. Her article gives the reader “3 ways of promoting religious freedom to your liberally inclined friends and relatives.”

It’s a great explanation of the principles behind the Supreme Court decision that can also help clarify in your own mind just why “[t]he Hobby Lobby decision is a win for personal integrity, cultural diversity, and tolerance”:

Sometimes deep and serious commitments run up against each other, as, for example, when one person’s family commitments conflict with another’s religious beliefs. Those are the hard cases, and we have to sort them out as well as we can. But it’s very hard to argue that anyone’s personal integrity is deeply threatened by an employer’s refusal to pay for their contraceptives. …

[M]odesty gives us an additional reason to be wary of curtailing religious practice. Wise people recognize it’s bad to fool around with things you don’t understand.

Great religious faiths offer their followers a complex and comprehensive metaphysical and moral outlook. It’s extremely difficult to judge from the outside how a given belief or practice fits into that wider perspective. The best policy, therefore, is to respect religious groups’ claims of conscience so far as circumstances allow.